The Clan Crusades

The time of the clans was upon the water children during Age of Kingdoms. Threats to the sovereignty of the water children grew larger than solitary families could withstand. Families began to band together into larger clan groups. The clans offered individual water families protection but imperiled water children as a race. The dividing of the race along clan lines greatly increased tensions amongst conflicting factions. Throughout the era of the clans, battles frequently erupted between feuding families. Most often these were small scale or short-lived melees but at the end of the clan era a large-scale war broke out drawing all the water clans.
The Clan Crusades began when various kingdoms sought alliances with the powerful water clans. The monarchs coveted the innate mystical abilities of the water children and in trade for offered the newly allied clan a title of nobility as well land grants or trade rights. It was a time heretofore of unknown wealth and power for the water children. They changed from bands of primitive nomads to political giants. There was even a pair of water kingdoms founded in this era. The kingdoms of Grail and Harquist were formed when two clans overthrew their allied monarchs and declared their clan chiefs to be the new sovereign of those territories.
Clans vied for the most lucrative colonization rights, trade deals, and territories. They undermined alliances between monarchs and rival clans using sabotage, espionage, abductions, and even assassinations. As the competition for these royal alliance increased, so did the covert, and eventually overt, antagonism.
When these subversive tensions rose to the surface, the Clan Crusades exploded. Entire clans were exterminated. Noble clans were torn from their seats of power by jealous rivals, kingdoms collapsed, and the blood of the water children stained the countryside until many kingdoms united to terminate their troublesome alliance with the now pariah water children. The monarchs forcibly put down the clan uprisings and enforced the peace between the clans. The majority of the clans retreated from political positions. Some were too dangerous and potent to control and were exiled from the coalition of kingdoms. Only a dozen or more clans maintained their noble titles and it was these noble families that would in generations hence, during the Age of Empires, build the noble houses, which ultimately would be winnowed down to the Five Houses of Water.